CH 19

Title: You finally talked with your childhood friend

What in the world is going on here?

All I could do was blink in surprise.

Calm down, calm down, Kishima Ayane. Is this really not a dream? There’s no way, the scene in front of me is completely unbelievable!

The worn down road to the shrine we explored as elementary schoolers…..I still remember that scene from back then like it was yesterday; I remember Kaizaki Hikaru—Hika-chan—pulling Yukki by the hand.

[TLN: No, I’m not tripping she’s calling Yuki  ‘ゆっき’(Yukki) in hiragana for some reason. Ig nickname]

Back then, this thicket looked so huge to us.

All of us–not just Yukki–were scared, so I remember thinking that it was unfair. Maybe that’s why I still remember this now….

When they started attacking Yukki with those words, I couldn’t protect her.

I had been the one that was the closest to Yukki, but a distance began to form between us. It felt like the girls in our group were trying to get me to join them in separating from Yukki, in excluding her.

And then, we stopped interacting with each other altogether.

When we finally entered high school—Yukki stopped coming to school. For the first two weeks, she tried her best to attend. And, because she was doing her best, I wanted to do my best too. I wanted to talk to her, to reconcile with her. But, the moment I decided to do that, she had an attack at the morning school assembly.

Someone had said those words to her. I was almost certain about that.

—After that, Yukki stopped coming to school…

I guess this is what you call regret.

[TLN: For once delay isn’t because I’m too demotivated but because I’ve been working my ass off and barely have free time even though it’s break. This’ll probs continue for like another 2 weeks so idk if I can get another chapter before then. In terms of TLing this chapter, a lot of what the author wrote didn’t flow very well in english, so I added a bunch of extra transitions not in the text, but I think it still conveys the same meaning.]